I can see the ending/solution going down totally the wrong way with some readers, resulting in lower ratings than we have given this strange novel. on the other hand, I woke up this morning with the book totally on my mind--it even kept me up in bed last night, just lying there pondering it--and had totally convinced myself that it was deserving of a mighty 4.5 rating, not just a 4. but I think I'll leave it at a comfortable 4 stars, because the cleverness of the solution does have a teeny, teeny bit of "only in a Locked Room potboiler can you get away with this". I still loved how the final revelations gave a totally new way of looking at what had been presented, as if a blurriness infecting the crime scenes just went away, and the true, accurate way of looking at the bodies and their locations and the details of any evidence around them, washed away all the assumptions I had made. of course, I'll still be mystified, and will get fooled again, next time around. I also liked the fact that the splashes and weird sightings out on the water actually play into things, but of course there was no selkie, no fish-man coming up out of the murk, killing people, and then swimming off again. what was really going on out burn was of course a clue, but tricked the brain into thinking about monsters...

All of the splashing and eeriness is what put me in mind of what I put in the spoiler tag.

I find so many of these golden age/classic crime solutions to be preposterous that those kinds of endings don't bother me anymore. See, e.g., Murder in Mesopotamia. Also, The Adventure of the Speckled Band.

I actually had more problems with the incessant martyrdom--everyone willing to throw themselves upon the sword to somehow heroically get the heat off someone else--that seemed to erupt every 60-70 pages, than I did with the ingenious solution.